Thread

1. egglinton · 1790977646 · focus · HN ↗

   These papers simply present the accumulated damage hypothesis with new window dressing. They do not account for the known facts.

   The article about these papers does not present a mechanism that would account for the Hayflick Limit.

   Nor does it explain why dogs, for example, age and die more quickly than humans. If there is a mechanism of epigenetic drift that would explain this, I do not see it in the article.

   The obvious answer to senescence is that we are programmed to do it. Cells die when they are supposed to die; if they don't, we have a problem.

   Likewise, mammals die when they are supposed to. It takes less time to train a puppy to survive on its own than it takes to train a human. Hence, dogs are optimized to age and die more quickly. It's better for the species.

   If we were not programmed to get old and die, evolution through natural selection would not work. We would never adapt to changing environments and our species would fail.

   Aging and death is not an accident or a deterioration from damage or a drift away from a correct instruction set. It is an absolute hard necessity, without which we would all be long gone.

   Stop wasting your time on nonsense articles like this and seek the mechanism that provides us as a species with the flexibility to adapt. Until we see aging and death as an core mechanism, we're going to be looking in the wrong place.

   1. jimberlage · 1790998656 · focus · HN ↗

      On a long enough timescale, things with a small chance of occurring become a virtual certainty. This includes the best of the human experience and the worst, which can get pretty dark.

      Why do people want to live forever?

      1. goatlover · 1791003251 · focus · HN ↗

         There is a vast amount of difference between growing old and dying by 100+ and living until the heat death of the Universe trillions of years from now. Surely something in between, say centuries or millenia without death from the ravages of old age would be ideal. Life is too short and tends to end in a bad way, would be nicer if it was a bit longer and more open ended without the decline until something fails.

         1. tclancy · 1791045672 · focus · HN ↗

            I wonder about this at 50. Being an odd duck, my philosophy here is based on a Conan story about a race that lived forever and had an actual ceremony for when the decided to end things.

            Stuff accretes over time. One shoulder, the opposite arm due to compensation, both big toes, etc. But take away all of that and there are still accretions: I’ve started to track the point where I know more dead people than live ones. Of course you can compensate for this and my wife and I have a wide social circle that we tend like good gardeners, but that feels like a delaying action. At some point I’m going to hit, “Hey, fellow kids!” if I haven’t already. Put more simply, will there come a time when the idea of falling in love with one more dog just to lose them will feel like a bad bet?

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